The new price is 1.75% + 30c per transaction for Australian American Express cards. This is the same price we charge for Australian Mastercard and Visa cards. For international cards, we’ll continue to charge 2.9% + 30c per transaction. As always, the fee for each transaction will be listed in real time in your Dashboard.

There’s no action necessary and we’ve automatically applied the new price to your account. If you have any questions or feedback about this change (or about Stripe in general), please let us know.

Thanks for using Stripe!

This is extremely good news. If you are like me, you love using your Amex for the extra points (I have a semi-addiction to points). Now it doesn’t cost the business anything extra to use it.

This is a question that comes up a lot. One of the best features of Stripe is that it allows you to seamlessly operate in multiple currencies and convert it all back to your main currency with zero input from you.

However that can cause an accounting nightmare in Xero, depending on how you want to do your books and how many currencies you work with.

That is because Xero only allows one currency per account.

Before you start syncing Stripe transactions to Xero, you need to really think about how you want things to look. Do you really need multiple currencies in Xero, or is converting it all into your home currency good enough?

Using Silver Siphon, you have two options. The example below uses Aussie Dollars (AUD) as the home currency, charging customers in USD. These are for example purposes only and they could be any currency in your setup.

Set up one account in Xero, in AUD. Stripe automatically converts everything to your home currency. This is the most popular method, the way we do things in our business, and usually the easiest. If you choose this method, on the Services page make sure “use original currency” is unchecked (the default)

Set up two (or more if you have more than two currencies) accounts in Xero, one in USD and one in AUD. The main reason you would use this method is if you need to reconcile against invoices in Xero and you want the amount to match exactly in the same currency. You can still match AUD to USD invoices, it’s just a little trickier and won’t match automatically.

The issue with this method is that the accounts balances in Xero will keep moving in one direction (AUD up, USD down) as there is no balancing between the two currencies – Stripe only transfers to your bank account in the one lump sump of AUD. If you go this way, you can link multiple Xero accounts on the services page. If you have already set up an account, you can unlink Xero and then relink, selecting multiple accounts.

Xero and Stripe are two amazing platforms, used by countless businesses around the world. It’s a bit unfortunately they don’t play very nice with each other.

If you’re already set up accepting payments via Stripe and creating invoices in Xero, you’ll have already noticed that reconciling the payments against invoices is far from simple.

As it stands, Stripe will transfer bulk sums of money into your bank account. By default, it looks like this

Stripe Transfers appearing in Xero

If you are processing multiple invoices per day, this sum is made up of all of those invoices, subtract Stripe fees.

Step 1

Click the Find & Match button, or the link at the top right of a bank statement line (money received)

Step 2

It will display a list of transactions that can be matched, including invoices. Tick all the invoices that fall under the corresponding bank transfer. As you do this, they will appear in the bottom box.

Step 3

When you have selected them all, the total will be out by the Stripe fee amount for the day. At this point, you should double check the fees in your Stripe dashboard to ensure everything matches with what you’ve just done in Xero.

Step 4

Then, click the adjustments button in the bottom right hand corner and select “Bank Fees”.

Enter in all the usual transaction fields as shown below. If you don’t have a “Stripe Fees” account set up, just use “Bank Fees”. For the amount in the right hand column, it needs to match the red text next to “Total is out by”.

Once the totals match, the Reconcile button will go green and allow you to reconcile all of the invoices you matched.

The Simpler Way

Silver Siphon enables you to import your Stripe transactions to Xero as if they were they own bank feed. This makes reconciliation against invoices incredibly easy, as Xero’s automatic matching comes into effect. You can also set up bank rules to reconcile against any other codes.

If you’re signed up to Stripe in Australia, you would have just received an email that had some exciting developments hidden at the bottom.

In short, they are working to expand the number of payment types they accept. Previously, Stripe has been a credit card only processor, which can be a deal breaker for some businesses.

They now have Alipay, Apple Pay and Android Pay in beta testing. When these are fully released, it will be good news for a lot of businesses.

Even more exciting is that they have partnered with some other companies to make it really easy to sell via Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. We have some guesses as to who this might be. Selling online is about to get even simpler!